Nachos Must be from Heaven

Trapped

I'm going to admit to just stream of consciousness writing this post right from the start. I'm totally going with what comes to me and I apologize if your brain suffers for it. If you just want a quick simple laugh the scroll bar will assist you in finding your way to the random last line of this post at the bottom. That being said, I am now going to slip into trancelike writer Nathan mode:

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I thought the air carried more than tiny drops of stinging cold water as I swished through the saturated ground of the campus commons on my bike. It seems more likely now that I just imagined it. Maybe it just would have given some weird form of justification for the day but either way it didn't matter. I was almost to the dorm and it was all but behind me. That's what I kept repeating. It's nothing bad. Maybe a large shadow of a smaller obstical. Honestly though, I know that it really isn't behind me, but all around me and here I am, flying down the sidewalk, towards something that leads me right back into the mix. Still I let the rain hit my face.

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Nine O'Clock already!? Only 5 hours of sleep! I still don't know why I seem to lose rational thought when the evening rolls around. You know how you think about sleeping earlier in order to not feel like crap in the morning, right after you wake up? I do that and it makes sense until night finally rolls around, then it just gets fuzzy. I stay up to late, feel like crap the next day, the cycle repeats.

Today was Nine O'Clock for my Math class at Nine Thirty. I just stared at something in my room after waking up. What? I don't remember, I think I just stared. Everything is very vague to me but I know I woke up my roommate because, in my staring, I allowed myself to be behind schedule. Fumbling around the room and making too much noise I finally got dressed and had a Capri Sun. I guess that my hurry can be blamed for my not looking out the window and my not picking up my cell phone. I did see that it was 43 degrees. I slipped on my treasured leather Jones jacket and ran to the elevator.

Outside a completely gray sky greeted me with little drops of rain smacking the concrete around. I thought about going back in to grab my raincoat but there was no time. I just ran through to my bike and "rolled out" to Bear Hall.

As I fully expected, I dozed through half of my math class. My professor is an odd mix of Mr. Sweenie from Boy Meets World and Mr. Magoo. Really nice guy but horribly boring. My next class was in Randall Library. Before heading up to the auditorium I bought an energy drink. It was like red bull only 16 oz. I was ten minutes early. There was one other guy in there. He asked me about something concerning class Tuesday since he hadn't been there. I hadn't either. We sat for a while talking about school and spring break. Before we knew it, it was 3 minutes before class and still no one else was there.

"I'm thinking maybe there isn't class and we just don't know because we weren't here Tuesday." he said.

The thought really hadn't occurred to me. A girl then came in and, after informing us of her recent trip to a Jimmy Buffet concert, took her seat. I didn't want to but I had to. I asked her if she had been there Tuesday. She hadn't either.
The other two left within the next 10 minutes. I didn't stand up for another 30 minutes. I used the dead silent auditorium of the library to my advantage, catching up on some reading for the class that I had failed to do. Not all of it, but some of it. I was still sipping on that energy drink. My chest felt weird.

The silence of that library holds a strange comfort that I'm only just beginning to appreciate.
After I finished I plodded down the big staircase to the front door where rain poured onto the commons in front of me. For the second time of the day I found myself simply staring. When I left Schwartz I had already made the decision that the Jones Jacket would not get wet. Thinking on it for a second I decided I still had reading I could do so I found a comfortable cubicle and had a seat.

Every time I sit in the cubicles at Randall I can't help but think about how they're shaped like swastikas. Why is that so funny? The silence greeted me again and encouraged me to finish even more reading that I planned on. It was broken only occasionally when a group of giggling girls would pass on their way to the auditorium or a couple of loud guys walked by on their way to the "Gov. Books" section, discussing their planes to get "messed up" this weekend. By this point the energy drink had done something to me, I'm not sure it was energizing. My heart was beating unusually hard.

The top of the desk shelf was dusty and I pushed the dust into the air. It swirled in a frenzy as dust has tendency to do when stirred, then settled again. My reading was done and thanks to the sanity thieving properties of the silence I found myself deep in thought once again.

It was then that I realized that I had been trapped in the library by the rain but that there was a reason it felt so familiar. School is trapping, and so is life and just like my hand with the dust it stirs us up only to let us settle again. This happens again and again with little hope of being that tiny bit of dust that hits the air vent at the top of the room and flies on the better things.

The ceilings in Randall are very high.

Feeling a little more depressed than usual I walked my stuff back down the staircase, now an hour and a half later, to find the same scene out the doors. That stinking rain.

The call of the Nazi cubical rang in my ear and I knew I still had work I could do. I knew there was something to keep me from the misery outside. With no cell phone and no one to call, I resigned myself once again to the misery inside.
Then that crazy voice in some deep part of my brain welled up in me and before I knew it I was carefully folding the Jones jacket and placing it in my backpack.

I knew that ride was going to be horrid, but there was a warm dorm on the other side of campus and maybe a grilled cheese sandwitch in Wag. You just can't ignore that forever.
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What if toaster ovens had cell phone ring tones? That would be pretty cool.
No, nevermind, I don't want to start hearing a "please turn off your toaster over" spiel when I go to the movies...